Blog Starter Check List 2

Registries and Directories

1. Get a creative commons license for your blog content: Creative Commons makes it easy to assign a license for your online content. I use a license called "Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0"

This means (in english)

You are free to
* to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
* to make derivative works

Under the following conditions:
* by Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
* Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

2. Get a feedburner account and direct feeds through feedburner: Most probably your blogging software will automatically provide an RSS feed capability. However, chances are that you may not be able to track how many readers are subscribing (and how they are subscribing) to your feed. By burning your feed via feedburner, you can get those statistics. Again, it only takes a few minutes to setup a free account on feedburner.

3. Implement subscription chiclets: People use variety of RSS readers and you want to make it easy for them to subscribe to your feed from those RSS readers. Feedburner provides scripts to create those subscription chiclets. I suggest that you should take a look at the available options and add those chiclets to your blog site.

4. Claim your blog on technorati: By registering yourself at technorati and claiming it, you have an ability to put your photo with your profile. When people search for stuff on technorati and your blog comes up in the search results your thumbsize photo appears with the search result. Every single thing helps.

5. Provide email subscriptions to your blog: You will be amazed how many people want to read your blog via their email. It's easy to set that up. You can get a script to do that by registering at Feedblitz.

6. Link to your photo album: If you have an online photo album with a service like Flickr, put in a link to that as well.

7. Announce your blog to the world: The first thing that you can do is to use a service like Pingomatic to ping a few servers. Of course, best would be to write compelling content that would make others link to your site.

8. Link to your online bookmarks: If you have an account with del.icio.us and are tracking some interesting websites, you can link to your bookmark page.

9. Validate your feeds: Simple way is to subscribe to your own feed in your RSS readers. Other way is to use FeedValidator to check if everything is OK

10. Geo-tag your blog: Feedmap provides a simple way of associating your physical co-ordinates (city, zip) to your blog. As more people sign up for this service, your blog will appear in the "bloggers nearby" for your neighbours blogs.

11. Claim your blog at Feedster: You claimed your blog at Technorati. Now, please go ahead and claim it in Feedster as well. If you do well, you might even get into the feedster elite club "Feedster Top 500" :) You can add an icon or your photo to personalize the search results

12. Register your blog at Findory: Findory aggregates some of the finest blogs and they recommend content based on users' interest. So if a user is reading an article in another blog that has similar content, he or she may be presented with your blog to consider reading.

13. Register at Blogwise: Blogwise is a directory that is created manually by a bunch of cool folks. You can submit your blog for inclusion and someone over there will add it to the directory if they find the content appropriate. You can check out the listing for Life Beyond Code and may be leave your comments on this blog there.

14. Register in the TTLB ecosystem: TTLB (The Truth Laid Bear) eco-system ranks blogs by links.

15. Register at Blogarama: Blogarama is another manually moderated registry.

16. Get Clustrmaps for your blog: Show visitor count and the regions from where the visitors are coming

17. Enable MyBlogLog click tracking: MyBlogLog is really cool. It takes about 2 minutes to implement on your blog and provides real-time tracking (Pro Version) of user behavior (where did they come from and where did they go) on your blog.

18. Publish your conversations from other blogs to your blog via CoComment: Succeeding in blogging requires participating in conversations. How do you bring all your conversations in one place? Well, CoComment has an answer via their Firefox plugin.

19. Leverage the power of HitTail to get more traffic: HitTail reveals in real-time the least utilized, most promising keywords hidden in the Long Tail of your natural search results. We present these terms to you as suggestions that when acted on will boost the natural search results of your site. It's that simple.

20. Give back some link love with WhoLinked: WhoLinked will search through the web and send you back a list of sites that are linking to your site. You can say "thank you" to those sites by putting up this widget.

21. Provide target website previews via Snap Preview: Snap Preview Anywhere enables anyone visiting your site to get a glimpse of what other sites you're linking to, without having to leave your site. By rolling over any link, the user gets a visual preview of the site without having to go there, thus eliminating wasted "trips" to linked sites.

22. Get cool widgets from MajikWidget: Do you want to add polls, voting or rating for your blog? Check out cool widgets from Majikwidget. You can get them for a song.

23. Register in BlogTopSites: BlogTopSites is a directory of blogs. Register your blog under the right category.